You Might Be A Fan If… – Foxfier

There’s been a bit of a to-do about who is a “real” fan, and someone pointed out an amusing contrast with the “real geek girl” to-do of a year or three ago– roughly, the sides are reversed. This got me to thinking (quake in fear!), and late last night I realized– this one is backwards. Fan isn’t something you disqualify from, it’s something you qualify for. The things that were put forward as necessary to be a fan were just sufficient, not mandatory. It’s qualifications for a sub-group of fandom.

The word means something, but it was like a very odd conversation I once saw where someone tried to disqualify a Star Wars fan from being a scifi fan, because ‘Wars is an example of a science fiction setting for fantasy. Swords, sorcery, lost prince… it actually works rather nicely. But being fantasy doesn’t mean it’s not also scifi, it just means it’s not that it is unlikely to be either hard or hyper-realistic scifi, which is another argument where a sub-group is being over applied. Look at comic books: you run a good chance of having scifi, fantasy and technothriller themes on the same team, much less the same time-space continuum. Heck, I’m enough of an X-Men fan that I was one of those upset when a mutant who negates mutation-based powers negated a magic helmet. Yes, I’ll give fans of the Star-Wars-Movies-Which-Did-NOT-HAPPEN!1!11!1 trouble, but it’s usually in fun. About the only time I’d be serious would be the same as with the archetype of the Twilight Invasion– great, you like one thing in a category; would you call yourself a fan of classical music because Flight of the Valkyries is awesome? Much less take that as standing to opine about who else is a fan? It’s not a thing to be proud of, although it should not be a shame- fan, geek, fill-in-the-blank nerd are all descriptions.

The “real geek” thing I personally saw more often used on hipsters or as pushback; shockingly, didn’t see a lot of guys complaining about pretty girls dressing like comic characters, but did see folks pushing back when folks tried to mainstream the geekdom they’d chosen, to the point that it didn’t have anything to do with what it originally was– rather than wanting to share part of it, some folks wanted to control it. People being people, I’m sure at least some folks mistook someone with a different fandom focus for not being a fan at all, especially in the aftermath of the infamous Twilight ComiCon Invasion(s) of six or seven years ago, and pushed ‘back’ when there was no initial push. I’ve run into that a few times myself when checking out new game shops, being closer to the archetype of a romance novel reader than of a gamer. Never really rudely, and usually it just amuses me– if I’m dressed in my “take me seriously, I’m a mom” outfits, how are they supposed to know I’m not a well-meaning ‘dane looking for a gift for a geek relative? It’s not like I have “former raid tank” written across my forehead, and approaching my sister like she’s a geek would probably scare her off, which is really bad for a game shop.

I know I’ve touched on this before with the somewhat related “hipster or real geek” question, but I still think it’s accurate– to be a fan is to love. To geek on a thing is to show your love so openly that it becomes an obvious vulnerability.

So, in the grand tradition of the Redneck jokes, here’s a start- can you add some?

You may be a fan if:

You have ever spent more time on plausibility fixes for a plot hole than the original author did.

You get annoyed by plotholes that make the the people who did an adaptation of one of your fandom targets get huffy about your over-thinking, and can explain a half-dozen different and very easy fixes.

You love the adaptation anyways.

You know more about the relationships of your favorite characters than the relationships of your co-workers and/or family members.

You carry a grudge for a change to a character that was made a decade ago.

You love an entire franchise because of a single Crowning Moment of Awesome that was a decade ago.

Your car, computer or router is named for a character or item in a book, or make a joke about it. Bonus points if you have customized your car to make the joke on its own.

Your ring-tone is from a game, movie or show.

You are asked by co-workers to set up their ring-tone for one from a game, movie or show.

Family and friends call you for “the name of that guy in the show you liked, you know, the one with the science-y thingie?”

….and you are able to give it to them.

You have ever had a “Who would win, Batman or” conversation.

You are now prepared to defend whichever side you take in those, to the pain.

You smiled even a little because of the Princess Bride allusion.

You have ever had to explain you were quoting the Princess Bride, and proceeded to bully the person asking into watching the movie.

You have ever been shocked that someone hasn’t tried a fandom you consider basic, and proceed to try to correct this with great enthusiasm.

That and/or spending an evening debating continuity (and solving the holes or trying to) in a series that was infamous for gleefully ignoring the entire concept of continuity. Because an infidel (Trekkie) complained about not liking the series because it didn’t follow the known past.

I’ve been known to complain loudly that they ruined Captain America when they did that frozen in ice retcon to start the Avengers in the sixties, well before I was born. I recently wrote several hundred words about how Rogers would’ve been understood when he was written, then deleted it because I’d mangled my log on at Sci Fi Wright.

The only comics I can really be said to have followed are Jim Zub’s Wayward.

There was a two-part novel published a decade or so back in which the author managed to justify the Eugenics Wars in our own history as an X-Files-like secret war that only occasionally bubbled into public knowledge. He even managed to bring in other Trek stories that took place in the 20th century that appeared after ‘Space Seed’. It was great.

My favorite Dolly Parton story is that while on tour she would stay at moderately-priced hotels so that any fan seeing her would think, “Say, she looks like Dolly Parton, but no way Dolly Parton stays at a place like this.”

That’s a woman who understands people, no matter what her education certificates read. (I wonder whether she is available to do Granny Weatherwax…)

…You can swear in Fen-ese, using terms like drek, gorram, frack, etc. and only another fan will have any clue what you’re talking about.

…You rage about the way a fictional character was killed and can’t remember what one of your relatives died of.

and last, but certainly not least…

…You are convinced, UTTERLY convinced, that that gorram author who wrote that absolute piece of drek bestseller would have written a much better story if the motherfracker would just have written the way you would have.

I think I’d go with the Cardassian as a name-sake, unless I had a lizard at the same time… although knowing me I’d name the lizard for the Minbari and the cat for the Cardassian. (I don’t think I could bring myself to do that to any dog I’ve met.)

You’re probably younger than I am, so you may not have been around for MidAmericon 1 in 1976, and The Great Fringefan Deprecation. As Boomers came of age in great howling hordes, Worldcons were getting bigger, and at some point began outgrowing their traditional venues. The concom, led by the young Ken Keller, had this notion that if they excluded Movie / TV / D&D / Fantasy / Horror fans, the crowds might become more manageable. So much time was spent gently telling “fringefans” that the con would have nothing to interest them. All-night movie rooms were canceled, as was programming catering to non-print media and gaming.

There was a great deal of bitching and moaning, and Keller took a lot of hits for alienating people who had nominally been in fandom for many years. I consider that year the true beginning of independent media fandom, which led directly to DragonCon and ComiCon, both of which ventually dwarfed even the largest worldcons.

I wrote a silly filk of “Gee Officer Krupke” from West Side Story to razz Keller about it, which began:

The concom, led by the young Ken Keller, had this notion that if they excluded Movie / TV / D&D / Fantasy / Horror fans, the crowds might become more manageable. So much time was spent gently telling “fringefans” that the con would have nothing to interest them.

That’s… um… wow. Certainly not a solution that most con-runners today would consider.

There was no option to find a larger venue or refine their crowd management?

The venue was, I think a ruse. The real reason was archetypal fannish snobbishness, a tradition that goes back to the prewar era. Keller was very young, and I’ve sometimes wondered if he was just looking for attention / publicity. He certainly got it.

It may be a family thing. My sister, Gretchen Roper, is a tolerably famous filker, as is her husband Bill. They own filker.com. I wrote “Our Space Opera Goes Rolling Along,” “The Outer Space Marines,” “The Zero-G Polka,” and “I’m a Trekkie,” along with a few others nobody remembers anymore. I guess I’m a fan, though I think I may be a wrongfan these days. It’s been a weird few months.

You’re absolutely right: The problem is that I’ve been mostly out of fandom for almost thirty years, and mostly stopped writing SF once I learned how much money there was in writing computer magazine articles and books.

I’m retired from tech publishing now and am trying to restart my career as an SF writer. Maybe I should write more filk songs too.

Thanks! That book has been in print now for 26 years and four editions, and single-handedly paid for my house in Colorado Springs. People ask me why I stopped writing SF. That’s pretty much the answer.

Yup, I’m the Maureen who kept getting mistaken for Mary Bertke from the rear — at least until her braids got more elaborate and I got wider. I still live in the area, but I didn’t make it to Millenicon this year. Haven’t been to Marcon or OVFF for a long time, alas.

Hubby and I are multi genre fans. He: filk, gaming, movies and books. Me: books, fanfic, tv shows, slash. He proposed in a filk. actually it was very small con and his proposal was the friday night filk (I remember it well!) We are both rabid B5 fans.

You might be a fan if your family teases you for calling William Shatner “Bill” in a casual conversation.
You might be a fan if all of your WoW Hunters and their pets are named after characters in some of your favorite series.

My Dad refers to Boston Legal as: that new show with Captain Kirk. I have my house and router named ‘Logrus’ (Zelazny) and a former beagle named Golanth (McCaffery). We refer to my Dad’s Suburban as ‘the Battle Moon’ as we consider it not large enough to be the Death Star, but one step down.

Crap. I’ve done this fight but it’s been awhile. I’m thinking you have to kill the spots where the chains connect first, then fight the boss. I think. It’s been awhile though.. Also, watch the adds but you already knew that.

I had an instructor in college, a grad student who was adamant we not accord him an unearned honorific by addressing him as “Professor” — but try as I might to abide his request it was terribly difficult to raise my hand in class and ask “Mister Mann?”

There are no Mundanes. None. Every time I think I’ve met one and had the time to get to know them a little, I find they are fannish about something.

I discovered this by accident some years ago at a Balticon. That was the era when the con was experimenting with inner Baltimore venues, and was spread across more than one hotel. The hotel I was in was also hosting a convention of professional bowlers. And by midnight, you couldn’t tell which party was whose.

“Mundandes” are a myth intended to make fen feel like insiders. But tgreater truth is that we all belong to subcultures that are, structurally, similar to fandom.

Eeeee… depends on how you’re using the term “fan.” I’ve horrified folks by pointing out that the prior pope is a total religion geek, for example. Watch some of his interviews and it comes across very wonderfully.

My dad, on the other hand, is zero fan score if you don’t expand it into normal fiction and beyond. He didn’t even read fairy tales as a kid.
It’s not like he dislikes it, he’ll WATCH the Lord of the Rings and such with enjoyment, but the stuff he enjoys is the same part he enjoys in, oh, Braveheart. So what if the archer has pointed ears and the Irish guy is extra short? (Don’t get him started on farming and ranching, though; that is his geekdom.)

If we expand our version of “fan” to all things that are similar to fandom, what the heck do we call being a fan? Not everybody has a passion that they geek out on– something they love that way.

I once got into a mild argument about fandom with a friend of mine. He was complaining about how some people he’d once met had been obsessive about stats in a pencil and paper RPG, and as a result took the view that RPGs were bad. I noted that what he was describing wasn’t much different than a couple of guys obsessing over basketball stats.

The only difference was that one of the obsessions was based off a wide-spread, and thus more socially acceptable, behavior.

“No fanbase outdoes these people in arcane minutiae and the sheer amount of trivial knowledge contained in their respective fandoms.”

Oh, I dunno: the gun nuts come close, as in S&W vs. Ruger. Or Glock vs. everybody, if self-loaders are your thing.

Myself, my preferred answer to the “Ford vs. Chevy” debate is Mopar, ’68-69 Charger, by preference, with either the 440 or the Hemi.

Although I sure wouldn’t turn down a nice first-gen, big-block Chevy Monte Carlo; I really loved the 402-powered ’71 Monte I had in high school, and have regretted selling it ever since. (Especially since the subsequent owner totally *destroyed* it. Sob.)

What about Dallas Cowboys fever. Worse, in AL it’s Auburn vs U of A. Everyone has to declare themselves. Montgomery, AL has the worst pro team name ever: The Montgomery Biscuits. They get beaten often.

“Most witches don’t believe in gods. They know that the gods exist, of course. They even deal with them occasionally. But they don’t believe in them. They know them too well. It would be like believing in the postman.”
–Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett

“I don’t hold with paddlin’ with the occult,” said Granny firmly. “Once you start paddlin’ with the occult you start believing in spirits, and when you start believing in spirits you start believing in demons, and then before you know where you are you’re believing in gods. And then you’re in trouble.”
“But all them things exist,” said Nanny Ogg.
“That’s no call to go around believing in them. It only encourages ’em.”
–Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett

I wanted to have fun in my signal unit pointing out that jocks pouring over fantasy football stats was the same behavior as nerds pouring over WoW stats, just more socially acceptible, but I might as well have been speaking Ancient Klingon to them…

comic books are the superhero genre — there are also books in it — and the superhero genre is defined by the use of the superhero tropes, much like the genre of sonnets is defined by the use of the sonnet structure.

Logical coherence is not its strong suit. Indeed, once a work using superhero tropes moves too far in the logical coherence direction, it tends to stop being superhero.

(It’s a topic I’ve been pondering a lot lately as I read superhero books.0

If you look too closely at the boundaries of Science Fiction, they will disappear. By no logical progression I can think of are Scottish Games Days fannish, but I am here to tell you that there are areas where the two communities are essentially the same.

Superheroes can be SF (The Gladiator by Wylie strikes me as qualifying). They can be fantasy. Or they can be simply kids stuff, which (Comic Fandom’s shrieks of horror aside) a lot of they surely were until a couple of decades into their history.

Superheroes can use SF tropes and fantasy tropes, some of which are indeed superhero tropes, defining in the genre.

However, if you ever use enough SF or fantasy tropes, you are not writing superheroes. Iron Man is a superhero. Warhammer 40K Space Marines are SF. Artemis in Wearing the Cape is a superheroine. The vampire in Sunshine is fantasy.

Witness that most urban fantasy uses tropes that have been current in superheroes for decades It’s not superheroes, however, because it limits the tropes and organizes them, so that it’s fantasy.

I’m sorry if this annoys, but to my mind the effort to make clear lines between SF, Fantasy, Supers, and a dozen other subgeneras, is strikingly like the old joke about analysis of humor being like dissecting a frog; nobody’s that interested, and the frog dies.

Is the Liaden universe SF, or Fantasy, or something called Space Opera?

$4.99 for 25 pages? You get one scene if you’re lucky! The writing is bad. The comics that I enjoyed and was following have been discontinued. The worse the comics get, the easier it gets to stop buying them. Can anyone explain what Convergence was, aside from fan fleecing?

It isn’t the $4.99 for 25 pages that kills — it is when you figure out that (for example) a 12-issue “maxi-series” has just cost you more than a novel … and you had to wait a month between installments … and then there was that three month gap between issue 9 and 10 while the writer tried to figure a way out of the corner he’d written himself into.

So you decide in future to wait until the whole thing is in hand before reading the first issue and around issue four you realize this is not the work of “the new Frank Miller” so much as “the new Wayne Boring.”

I have dropped all Marvel and DC comics from my pull list a couple of months ago after just one too many “Crossovers that takes over all our titles, and you’ll be lost if you don’t buy every single one”.

There are still plenty of $2.99 titles out there. But then, I remember when Indy comics were $1.50 and mainstreams were under a buck.

You should try to get a hold of McCrumb’s Highland Laddie Gone: it might amuse you greatly. IIRC that’s the one with a brief scene in which two police officers, off-duty at a Civil War re-enactment, in full kit and on horseback, are headed over to deal with a murder at the nearby Highland Games. Something causes the ( also taking place, and yes, I used to live in that part of Virginia: totally plausible!) local SCA event to come up. Quoth, the one officer, “what a bunch of weirdos.” The other disgustedly agrees.

Some con goers and a pair of airline pilots were waiting for the elevator when they concluded that it was broken. So the con-goers went off to look for the stairs . Said one pilot to the other, “Follow the weirdos — they always know where the stairs are.”

Bought a Thor comic because it was written by JMS. Female Thor is a slap in the face of every man who reads comics. Didn’t need to feminize Thor. Sif is totally kickass. They didn’t want a kickass woman, they wanted a male impersonator.

J Michael Straczinski, the creator of Babylon 5. He actually had a cameo in the first movie as the guy who found Mjolnir.

He may be an atheist, but he handles religion so well that I know several of my more strictly Christian friends who would watch Babylon 5 for no other reason that it didn’t come across as insulting their faith.

What was the title? Does it have female Thor or no? (the whole thing of genderswapping is fun for fanart, not so much for canon) YES about Sif; they didn’t explore her instead of putting boobs on Thor.

What happened is that for some reason (unknown) Thor lost his confidence that he was “worthy” of his hammer so he was unable to use it. Note, currently Thor doesn’t become Dr. Blake if he puts the hammer down for a certain period.

Jane Foster (Blake’s former nurse) was able to pick it up and became a female version of Thor. For a time, we didn’t know who the woman was as her helmet masked her. Thor (the original) learns who the woman is and decides she can have the name Thor. Currently the original Thor is calling himself Odinson. Oh, he lost an arm so has an artificial arm and uses a “magic” sword.

Note, I have only got this from what I read about the “female Thor”. I lost interest in Marvel comics a few years ago.

Years back, a Barfly mentioned on Kratskeller that he had long been a contributor to TV Tropes, and had recently had some of his stuff on Kratman edited by folks who probably hadn’t read Kratman, and were not fans. This was apparently to the point of being a rules violation. Management backed the edits. In more recent terms, SJWs had taken over TV tropes.

I also heard later, from a different source, similar reports about a cabal of folks running TV Tropes. One was the guy who does the Drunkard’s Walk fanfic, and who had put up stuff about historical fanfic on TV tropes. He left TV tropes in protest. (He did not use the term SJW. I despise his politics, but trust his reporting on this.) One of the guys he knows set up that fork of TV tropes, I think called all in the tropes.

With television, I sometimes end up prefering the the fanfiction to the show. At least after a certain point*.
*Yes, the actors can and will leave and the writers have to deal with it but dang it, that was not a good exit for that character.

To be a fan or not to be, that is the question.
Whether ’tis Nobler in the mind to obsess
The Orcs and Elven of outrageous Fandom,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of Tribbles,
And by opposing, end them?

The argument over “Who a fan?” reminds me of the debate between Baseball fans and Stat-heads, a debate which has especially affected Rotisserie Baseball aficionados.

Baseball fans insisted there were only two true stats: Batting Average and Earned Run Average … followed by a collection of “counting stats” such as hits, total bases, home runs, strikeouts and wins. The Stat-heads insisted the “true” stats were flawed and failed to represent the true nature of what events actually represent ability to win the game. This debate finally worked its way to the top echelons of the sport, an achievement described in the film Moneyball.

Who were the real Baseball fans? All of them, none of them, who cares, sit back, have a beer and enjoy the @#!% game! As Bill James, the fount of Sabremetrics (statistical analysts), wrote: Sportswriters take a position (Babe Ruth was the greatest hitter ever) and marshal arguments i support; Sabremetricians ask “What would be the definition of a great hitter” and sift the data to determine the result (which, by most metrics, puts babe Ruth atop the list.)

Until we define the qualities determining fandom any debate is useless (except as entertainment.) It seems to me there are at least a few questions essential to the definition, and I don’t know the answers.

Does Fandom require more than normal emotional investment in the genre? How much more?

Is Fandom bounded, and if so, by what? Are the distinctions between SF Fandom – Readers and SF Fandom – Filmgoers determinative? How much of the Venn circles overlap is required? Is a person who adored Star Trek, memorized every Original Series episode (and can recite the dialogue on cue) and read every Trek book and comic and coloring book ever published a SF fan — even if they read NO OTHER SF? More simply, is a Trek fan also an SF fan?

Are you only a fan if you identify as one, so that a person who reads nothing but SF, has read (or sampled) every major work in the field since Gernsback but demurs being termed a fan is not, in fact, a fan?

Is fandom a status battle for those lacking in actual status in the larger social structure? (See: Simon Pegg, recent statements by.)

You may be a fan if you lurk on sites like ATH or Chaos Manor, and are all excited when you find out for a mere $40.00 you can vote on the Hugo’s and help to stop the SJW’s takeover of your favorite genre?
I consider the blurry line between Hard SF/Soft SF/Fantasy and even some mystery and romance themes to be totally acceptable. More novels=more fun! Some of Hard SF’s novels are riveting because the great extrapolation of scientific theory and the practical application of story line (warning: may have cardboard characters). Technically, I suppose extrapolation of social science is Hard SF, but I expect it to have real characters, and the science is more ‘messy’. Fantasy is what currently comes out in each and every White House press release, and it is very poor quality. But better Fantasy authors likewise run from magic as a rule set much like science to here there be Dragons.
The ones that I read, and probably do not give the Author as much credit as they deserve are the historical time travel or fantasy novels. They spend a lot of effort researching everything to be accurate, and in the sense that good ones come off believable, hard work is its own reward.
My brother doesn’t like Fantasy novels and I don’t like Techno-thrillers (Tom Clancy et allia), but that still leaves a lot of the SF arena that we both enjoy and can talk about to each other. I don’t believe either of us would call the other one a non-fan.

You are a Fan if you consider all shows/books/movies of a certain genre “inferior” copies of your favorite example of that genre.

Example: Star Trek fans looking down on Babylon 5 because the makers of it didn’t make it like Star Trek. Of course, they would likely had gripped even if B5 did something the same way that Star Trek did. [Evil Grin]

You might be a fan if you meet Newbery Award winning author Laurence Yep at an ALA convention, and hauled out your battered much-loved copy of Shadow Lord (#22) for him to sign (yes, I now have an autographed copy. Eat yor hearts out fellow Trekkies).

He was actually quite pleased: apparently he’s proud of the story, and no-one else had ever gushed over it as thoroughly before 🙂

Nah Sheridan! Excellent tactician, strategist and politician. He almost died and came back to life. Was elected President of the Alliance and had the hottest wife. I like Sinclair he just wasn’t as good as Sheridan.

The mecha equivalent is (or was… haven’t been around any mecha forums in a while, so I don’t know if they’re still arguing these two sides) EVA vs Gundam fight.

Of course, these fights typically had the EVA fans insisting that certain “sufficiently advanced” Gundam technologies (Moonlight Butterfly, anyone?) couldn’t be used, while simultaneously bragging about how powerful a fully kitted out EVA with all the bells, whistles, doo-dads, and S2 engines, was.

I knew a fan of Macross who was so die-hard about it he could quote back the specifications of each season’s mechs, and was also so into Mecha anime in general he could launch into hours-long rants about them.

For reasons I never quite understood, I was also referred to by him as “Lt. Commander Modena.”

Season 5 Andromeda has an episode where the Andromeda Ascendant gets boarded by hostile forces, and the two (female-avatar) androids meet up with a bunch of them in the P-way. One of them makes the hand gesture “We are not the droids you’re looking for.”

I played in one world where we had observed that the Imperial warships were wonderfully shielded against energy weapons, and very poorly shielded against physical attacks. So we used missiles, amd wreaked havok.

So, Imperial Destroyer vs. Starfleet? Depemds on how clevr a captain you are dealing with. Also, do Imperial shields interdict transporters? If not, the Imperials are in fathoms deep kimchee.

OK, that’s what I thought, but then I remembered the start of _ESB_ and how close Han could get to the Super Star Destroyer, and how they were shooting their way through the asteroid field rather than trusting their shields, and . . .

Yes, well, the “asteroid field” in question appeared to be more a floating gravel pit full of large planetoid fragments. Based on size comparisons, the asteroid with the space slug was bigger than the superstructure area of a star destroyer. Anything *that* big hitting your ship is going to cause some serious damage regardless of whether you have shields or not.

Also, it’s never entirely clear (based on the movies) how shields work in Star Wars. We know that they exist, but we never actually see them when they’re functioning – unlike in Star Trek. And I suspect Lucas never really cared about them except as an excuse to add some additional dialogue. As a result, it’s entirely possible that “Deflector Shields” work somewhat similar to sloped armor on a tank – i.e. “deflecting” the energy of incoming fire away from the ship. Sure, that’s not what people typically think when they hear “Deflector Shields”. But Lucas never bothered to suggest anything different. And something like that would still allow the Falcon to directly grapple itself to the star destroyer.

One feature of most I’ve seen is they moved away from Doc Smith’s “wall shield” as part of the actual physical armor and more towards shields being generated by focusing energy at set distances from the ship. Thus a small ship could in fact fly “inside the shield” if it was escaping the larger ship itself, or the shields weren’t up for whatever reason.

That was one of the most popular answers, along with the ever-popular “Whatever the story requirements are.” Both of those answers would, of course, be ignored by the pedants, who would soon return to arguing minutiae, bringing up a host of non-canon information regarding cannon and shields, making poorly-constructed arguments-by-analogy, and of course, resorting to name calling.

About twenty minutes into my first viewing of The Phantom Menace, I came to the conclusion that Kimball Kinnison would have cleaned out all the baddies (including unfrocking Senator Whatshisface) in the first reel. Of course, after that what could they do for an encore? Doc Smith had the problem, too….

you followed an author about whom you are ever so slightly nutty to several book signings within the same week in your state (“oh, uh, hi Sir Terry. No, no, that wasn’t me, I just have one of those faces )

at least 50 percent of why you started reading and collecting some author’s work because she made references to aforementioned silghtly-nutty-about author in her blog. (the other half was the free chapters, it’s like a crack den around her, I tell you.)

and I assume not just fiction fandom can play so…

you’ve shared a one bed motel room with four other unrelated adults because you’d rather spend your con money on games and con-dice (shiny, shiny, sparkly dice!) then on a room, and besides, who needs sleep anyways, there are games to play.

you’ve volunteered at a con so you could have EVEN MORE money for games and shiny, sparkly con-dice, plus free con-voluntree t-shirt!

you wear said con-volunteer t-shirt in public.

you use the names of game designers instead of “G-d” in phrases like “Gygax willing,” or “MaRo forbid!”

My experience is that people are willing to buy both cheap and cheerful dice bags, and way too expensive dice bags. It’s one of the few cases where guys are allowed to accessorize and use bright colors, which I suspect is a secret selling point.

My personal unfavorite is the metaphysics in which gods and other beings are created and shaped by our belief, entirely — that never notices that people believe that they are independent of our belief, and therefore ought to be.

The book is a different construction than the film. It does things that the film couldn’t, and it’s very odd. It shows how the narrator’s grandfather edited what objectively is a godawful Late Victorian Gothic Romance into a childhood memory, something that the film doesn’t really touch. going from the book to the film is great. Going from the film to the book must be jarring as hell.

THE GREAT ESCAPE is s little like this. The book goes into a lot of “How To” details that the film simply hasn’t time for. The film gets into personalities and emotions that the book never touches, and which must have come largely from the scriptwriter’s imagination. Watching the film once you’ve read the book works fine. Reading the book after watching the film would be jarring unless (like me) you are already programmed to absorb somewhat dry factual writing.

Well, I suppose it might not have been meant to, but I did anyway. I vaguely remember the author depicting himself as an idiot at some point in the frame story. I think. Maybe in a swimming pool.

My friends were quoting something and told me it was The Princess Bride. I thought, ah, yes, I remember seeing that in the library, so I went and got it and read it. After which I found out they meant the movie. I’m not sure whether they had noticed there was a book.

Oh, I read the book ages before the movie, and it was far from the first edition. Fun, fun book. A totally different take on the story, does include a lot of frame story whiplash, but heck, the Arabian Nights have frame story whiplash. ‘S all good. 🙂

In the winter of ’74-75 one of the networks broadcasted the thing … on two days. I got to watch the first half, but there was some problem with seeing the second half. So I looked it up, and read the book. And then read THE WOODEN HORSE, and THE COLDITZ STORY, and FREE AS A RUNNING FOX. After that I branched out from WWII escape stories into other aspects of the War; THE WAR MAGICIAN, YOU’RE STEPPING ON MY CLOAK AND DAGGER, ONCE THERE WAS A WAR.

I can’t remember hearing the exact reasons that they’re starting with _Honor Of The Queen_ but I suspect that it’s because there are more space battles in Queen than there are in _On Basilisk Station_.

Oh, it is. The problem is that A. Unless Weber is keeping tight control over it, the scriptwriters will remove all of the nuances; B. if the nuances are maintained, they will not be noticed by reviewers, who will almost certainly focus on the Masadans rather than the Graysons.
And I’m also worried that they’d take out Reginald Houseman.

@Paul: Excellent
@Emily: Yeah, the strike episode was a bit obnoxious, but who wouldn’t strike in the conditions described?
Honestly, private sector unions are a useful counterbalance, it’s public sector unions that need to cease to be.

Seems to me I read it in junior high in the mid-sixties; it must have been a Scholastic Books offering. Man, I loved those; parents were usually suckers for those purchases with the sky the limit (admittedly a very low sky, and downright overcast if my grades were slacking.)

I made the mistake of telling a class that “No one under age 14 gets to quote or recite the Spanish Inquisition sketch.” Care to guess how many femtoseconds it took for me to discover that they were all 14 or older? *SIGH* Lesson learned.

Speaking of classes, my daughter came home after her first day of high school calculus some years ago and told me her teacher had said that this semester they would be learning “How to calculate the airspeed velocity of an unladen sparrow.”

She said that by the look on his face when she raised her hand and asked “African or European?” she knew she wouldn’t have a bit of worry about flunking the class.

Someone made a movie of the idea that only stupid people are reproducing, had a normal guy go into the future with a woman and observe how incredibly dumb everyone is, and end up saving the world from humanity by not being quite a total idiot.

Probably funnier if you’re drunk, but then I have a really low tolerance for various “people are all stupid and suck” setups, and spent most of the movie trying not to point out, ah, extreme implausibilities.

It’s in the style I associate with flanderized 18th-19th century rhetorical stories, but without as much of a point. Might tie into H. G. Well’s Time Machine, too, but supposedly funny. I’ve been told it’s something like “The Marching Morons,” but I haven’t read that, either.

At my best-friend-in-10th grade’s annual Twilight Zone marathon D&D event at which our PCs got dumped into some bizarro crossover world like Star Trek, our DM chose Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Which I had never seen. I had only been playing AD&D for about a month at that point. So when our party got to the bridge, of course, with much snickering , they shoved the Paladin forward in time for the “what is the flight velocity question.” to which I replied, “what species of sparrow?” (The DM “she’s in AP bio you dopes, what did you expect?”)

You might be a fan if this is one of your proudest moments from 10th grade.

Yesterday, while wandering around with older son, someone near us said something about men and women being exactly the same, except for “society”. I immediately said “Where would you keep it? In a box?” And Robert said “but I waaaant to have a baaaaby.” And I said “Shut up Loretta.” Anyone hearing us and not knowing what we were referring to would think us perfectly mad. (And anyone knowing would know we were perfectly mad.)

I used to know a guy who was imperfectly crazy — he was only crazy on odd days of the calendar. At least, that was the case until he took a time study course and decided he was spending too much time in set-up and switched to being crazy only in the odd months. His Halloween’s were kind of meh but you should have seen his Fourth of July!

Used hang out with a bunch of guys who had it memorized. I could quote large chunks before I ever saw it. Finally gave up on my grainy 3rd generation VHS copy and bought the DVD when it came out. “I want to turn on, I want to go up, and I want to go fast!”

When I married my gift-from-God, happily-ever-after trophy wife Vanessa, the elegant foxy praying black grandmother of Woodstock, GA, I told her there were certain books and movies she needed in order to understand The Patterson Experience. The movies were : The Princess Bride; Monty Python’s Quest For The Holy Grail; and The Big Lebowski. The book was Starship Troopers, but I read The Princess Bride out loud to her as a festival of goodness.

Does it count that I was part of the group who got John Ringo his romance novelist award for Ghost?
Even though Ghost is by no stretch SF (arguably fantasy in that impossible things happen) and I was there when Jim bullied John into letting Baen publish it.
And I still remember waiting ever so patiently each of those incredibly long periods that seemed to stretch decades between the time Heinlein wrote a new novel and the paperback I could actually afford came out. Hey, I was still in school, working part time at minimum wage, and everyone else in my family thought that “those” books I read were foolishness.

Ghost?
Terrific action adventure series with just a bare hint of mysticism.
Last one was a bit of a stinker, just didn’t have the same feel, but I understand it was an ill conceived co-author situation. John’s supposedly working on a new one that’s supposed to bring it all back together.

Middle third of Ghost, the first in the Kildar series.
First third is the rescue of those kidnapped Georgia co-eds.
Second deals with boat babes, nuke attacks in the Florida keys, and that whole consensual S&M thing.
In the third part they save Paris, never did understand exactly why though.

You are obviously younger than I. When I was in school you could get your new Heinlein in $0.35 installments. It took three or four months to get the whole novel, but you got a lot of good short stories to go along with it. I still have most of those magazines.

I was reading Analog back when it still called itself Astounding Science-Fiction. I hated the serializations. They always broke right at the good bits and then I’d have to wait an entire month only to have them do it to me again often three or four times before they wrapped it all up. Easier to either wait for the paperback or hope that it was something the school or public libraries found worthy.

I hear you. Since I was going to keep the magazines “forever”, the wait to get all the installments was still less than for the book.

I take back what I said about you being younger than I. Indeed, if you are serious about the hyphen between ‘science’ and ‘fiction’, you beat me by several years. ASF dropped the hyphen sometime in the early 1940s. (But from the mention of paperback editions, I suspect that we are of a similar age.)

In every subculture there are creatures who feel compelled to play politics, who must censor the opinions of others, and who backstab for the sheer joy of it. They mostly do not actually know much about the focus of the subculture and have often wandered in after being invited to leave some other subculture.

I’ve seen it go several ways from there. One group of fen i recall gave the would-be smof all the scut-work, worked him like a mule, and kept him too exhausted to make much trouble. Worked for a handful of years, and then blew up, but I’m not sure HE did it.

I have a Blaise. You’re no fun. Americans are so generally uneducated that the boy’s face lights up on the rare occasion when someone recognizes the name. Mostly it falls in the “How do you say that?” category. No one has teased him about it–apparently with a kid called ‘Blaze’ you don’t risk their temper–or maybe it’s because of the two big brothers. (It’s also a family name, French-speaking side, but Americans can’t handle the French pronunciation so we Americanized.)

Blaise Pascal is one of Dan’s heroes, so… And if I’d known how big Marsh would grow 6′ 3 1/2 and probably still growing (tallest in family in his generation with shoulders like like a linebacker, I’d have chanced it.
But he was a petite and skinny child, so maybe not.

My dad is Alan Richard, I’m Richard Alan because he didn’t want me to be a Jr. If I were to have a son (highly unlikely at this point) I wanted to name him Alan Richard, and start some terrible family tradition….

An addendum. Your favorite writer has to be a SF and fantasy writer for this to work. And not in the sense that I recently read someone talking about sound and fury online and concluded with the observation that, henceforth, whenever someone asks for her favorite contemporary SF writer, she’s going to answer, “Jane Austen.”

Miles, actually. My wife, (Her Ladyship Masked Pain) and I were discussing names when I jokingly suggested using names from our favorite novels.
We laughingly mentioned several joking options when I said “Miles”, and we both realized it was perfect.

While he is very outgoing, he doesn’t know how to manipulate people to get what he wants, (not that we necessarily think of Miles Vorkosigan as manipulative, but he is).
Mine is just a standard, sensitive, bright little boy. (I had to remove a lot of additional descriptors before I posted this. Proud father and all that.)

I used to have a cat named Pixel. Three reasons: the Heinlein reference, the fact that he was pretty much solid gray, and the fact that he was a feral kitten who had wandered into my (then) wife’s place of work and gotten stuck in a process camera.

My Pixel (who walks through walls) was marmelade and also best cat EVAH! His twin brother was Random Numbers (aka Randy) NEVER NAME A CAT THAT. DT and Zebbie (Carter) were brother and sister. And first cat EVER and Husband’s Cat was Petronius the Arbiter (cat from hell.)

One rainy night while the gaming group was playing, Azathoth decided to explore the great outdoors, and the Keeper’s wife sent out the convenient search party, After 30 minutes or so, one of my fellow gamers decided to try it.

He raised his arms to the heavens and cried “Ia! Ia! Azathoth!”. “Meow”. And followed him back……

If you get mad when people lose your dust jackets, you might be a fan.

If you buy dust jacket protectors for your books, you might be a fan.

If you pick up bargain shop copies of certain out-of-print books so you can lend them to people without anguish, you might be a fan.

If hearing somebody say “How come they can send somebody to the moon but they can’t (stamp out poverty, end war, do away with the designated hitter)” makes you want to kick them in the fork so hard they suddenly go deaf, you might be a fan.

If you saw BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS, and THEN saw SEVEN SAMURAI, and only last saw THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, you might be a fan.

If you first encountered THHGTTG as a set of cassette tapes recorded off the radio, you might be a fan.

If you remember that in addition to the Radio Series version, the Book version, the TV series version, and the film version, there was a distinct version of THHGTTG on LP record, you might be a fan.

If you have ever been up all night with a book, because you could go to sleep without knowing what happened, you might be a fan.

If you are male and have ever worn a cape as outerwear when not attending a con, a game, or the Opera, you might be a fan.

If you learned to sew, to whatever extent you know, by sewing costumes or garb, you might be a fan.

If you had a Renaissance wedding, you might be a fan.

If a artist with cover credits did your wedding portrait, you might be a fan.

Though I have to admit for the longest time I couldn’t understand why so much of Harry Potter fandom was obsessed with UPS and the gold standard.

(you might be a fan if you’ve never actually heard “Friday” (I think that’s the pop song’s name) all the way through, but you led a roomful of teens in a rousing chorus of Ravenclaw, Ravenclaw, (everybody wants to be in our house!) and you honestly prefer the Minecraft filks to any of the originals.

I never figured out the acronym for a girl who played male characters.

I did (because L2 male toons look as eyecandy as the female ones, bar the male dwarf) and then realized that it was a good idea to say I was a female when I’d get “I wish I could meet a guy as nice as you in real life.” o_o;

I generally play female characters not because I happen to be a lady, but because they look nicer. If I’m going to be staring at a derriere for hours upon hours of gameplay, it might as well be nice-looking.

A lot of games do not make male characters look hubba-hubba, oddly enough, or they only manage it for a restricted range of hubba. If you don’t like male tattoos, for example, some games have made it rather difficult for one. Also, I think there’s a lot less care put into the realism of male walking in games. Heh.

Personally, I think we need more swashbuckling male characters. And capes. 🙂

Sadly, this is very true. As a long and self-professed admirer of the male derriere, the …lower quality… of initial art, rendering, and movement on the male models is a sad, sad thing. However, completely understandable: most video game artists are male, and have, since puberty, been paying vastly more attention to the female form and movement than the male.

So, playing a female model it is. Although the blood elves in WoW had a nice mince to them, the game is still very lacking in John Wayne, Errol Flynn, or any other excellent models of male movement as seen from the rear.

Elder Scrolls Online is pretty decent for movement, and there are a massive number of single-player Elder Scrolls game mods for everything from hair and details on the gear to body-shape and jiggle factor.

My husband has spent waaaaay too much time trying to get the jiggle-factor one to work properly with his prefered body mod style. He likes the more realistic build mods and has one that is simply amazing for the hair, but the same jiggle-mod that takes into account armor and weapons makes the leather-clad kitty-girl’s rear go budonk-a-donk-a-donk-a-donk for giggle-inducing lengths of time.

(For folks thinking this sounds…questionable, this is the same guy who I’ve seen use a single hair to get the “right” details on a model. And when he gets the game set up to where he thinks it’s acceptable, it’s jaw-dropping gorgeous.)

It’s not that. The trailer actually provides a rationale for wearing a cape – aerodynamics in flight. I’ve no idea if real world physics bears that out. But I did think it kind of neat that they’d justify the cape.

And yes, Edna Mode was the first thing that came to mind when I was watching that part of the trailer.

Reasoning from model rockets here, so free and worth every penny. In order for an object traveling through air to be stable, the center of pressure must be farther back than the center of gravity. That is, drag should be behind weight, so that the body is pulled in a straight line. The cape is attached at the neck, in front of the center of gravity, unless Kryptonian brains are incredibly dense. Therefore, I would conclude there is no way in h*ll that cape contributes to stability.

The example given in the trailer is to make her more maneuverable in flight. There’s a “capes are dumb” sequence (with an amusing comment regarding Kara’s cousin – aka Superman), and then a scene showing Kara attempting turn a corner while in flight.

At one point, I had a character created and in a guild in EQ just so I could get online and tell where my housemates were, and what they were doing. “Oh, you’re in a raid? Okay, how long til you’re done, including at least one wipe for buffer? I don’t want the fish to get overcooked.”
…”You’re grinding? Dinner’s in 15 minutes.”

For some reason, there was never much doubt among the guild that I was female. There was, however, a lot of razzing on the housemates if they were camping a spawn instead of eating. Especially when I got on and started listing dinner.

“Tonight’s menu is: grilled pork chops with balsamic carmelized pears, and a side of asparagus. Unless you’re still camping Quillmane in South Karana, in which case, you can have ramen because the others will leave no leftovers.”

Yeah, they’re all on the Sims websites . . . where the default gender pronoun assumption is female for ambiguous handles. Which is why all the drama over gender assumptions is stupid: people will assume whatever is usual in that space because that’s how people work.

(The other half is because I RP with my husband, who prefers subtle, female characters. Although it’s really funny when people find out that we’re married and have kids when we’re both on female toons, and consistently pick me as the husband, it’s easier on folks’ skulls if we just let them make assumptions, if there are any decent looking ones.)

You could put the Macbeth character in Hamlet. In which case there probably would have been guards for him to get around, since his uncle would know his character. (There’s a source, I’ve heard, where the Hamlet character feigned madness to disarm the paranoid usurper.)

Then, if you put Hamlet in Macbeth instead of Macbeth, he would hear the predictions and conclude that he was sitting pretty when the first was fulfilled. To get a play out of it, you’d have to have Banquo betray him so that the king thought he would act on the prediction.

May the Swartz be with you.
Space Balls, the flame thrower. The kiddies love it.
You shot my hair. You Shot my Hair. (scene of indescribable carnage)
We’ve been Jammed. Only one man would dare…..
I’m my own best friend
MegaMaid

Never seen it. (right, and if you believe that, I have a town in the old west to sell you.)

Beloved Spouse & I contemplated purchase of a property near here in Climax, NC, but only if the manse was sufficient we could name it from James Branch Cabell — Storisende.

A classmate of the Daughtorial Unit in fifth grade got in trouble when (an overly sensitive) teacher asked him to explain why, during his performance of a “read-aloud” assignment, his voice rose in tempo and pitch at the end and the boy answered “That was my climax voice.”

I tried to name my not yet born kid Paul. My wife hates the Dune movie but was going to let it slide because I remembered a great uncle Paul so she could call it a family name. Then we found out he’s a she and no we have no idea what to name her. Ideas welcome 🙂

Hey, one of the perqs of being an admin is that you get to engage in theme naming. All my office machines are named after monsters of antiquity – I find it enlivens otherwise boring meetings and also gives me an excuse to say “Release the Kraken!” and have it be work related.

I once set up a cluster of mirrored servers. It names them Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, and Bonnie and Clyde.

Someone noticed and ran to upper management, which issued a directive saying my names made it impossible to tell which machine was main and which was fallback, and ordering I rename them pp1a, pp1b, pp2a, etc. forthwith.

The main problem seemed to be that a certain manager (*several* levels up, and not even in IT) had never heard of Abbott and Costello or Laurel and Hardy.

So… I aliased the new names in /etc/hosts and kept on using the old names.

You could use Stella and Ursula. Or Frank and Jesse. Or Frick and Frack, for that matter. For the trio, there’s always the classic Tom, Dick, and Harry. I kind of like the idea of Yippee, Yappee, and Yahooey, though. I’m sure I can come up with something worthwhile if I think long enough.

You might be a fan if you think Gerrold and Scalzi have been acting like poopy-heads, but you’d still ask them to sign your copy of (respectively) Game of Rat and Dragon & Zoe’s Tale, because you Just Loved Those Books So Much!

Thus far, my one and only publication was picked out and paid for by Mr. Scalzi. So, you know, I’m certainly happy about *that*. (Hugs that little payment in memory—ah, the sweet sound of bills being paid.)

I can’t and so don’t disagree with or argue about anything here. I am saddened to see the size of a generation gap from previous iterations of similar lists from other sources.

Long past suggestions have included such things as:
Knows what APA means, can expand the acronym and has typed stencils; extra points for ran the mimeograph and keeps a pumice in the bathroom to clean fingers not porcelain.
Hears the name Ceres and thinks first of the largest of the flying mountains.
Knows where L5 is and what’s there in more than one book; extra points knows L6 is (now was) the steel in a Gerber MKII and resents peace bonding.
Can still quote a definition of logarithm as first encountered in Misfit

One that should be, but isn’t, a universal.
(Hat tip Dr. Pournelle) – Knows many of the songs from To Touch the Stars Prometheus Music and tears up more than once listening/singing along.

You might be a geek if your first thought on hearing that they were going to be making a new Sailor Moon anime was the new writers it might bring into fanfic. Or your second thought was about legally getting an entire SM anime continuity. Or not. Maybe a true fan already has the old series.

“a very odd conversation I once saw where someone tried to disqualify a Star Wars fan from being a scifi fan”

That could make a fun thread all by itself: What’s the silliest attempt you have seen to restrict who qualifies as a fan, what qualifies as a fannish activity, etc? I’ll bet you folks have some funny stories.

“I know I’ve touched on this before with the somewhat related “hipster or real geek” question, but I still think it’s accurate– to be a fan is to love. To geek on a thing is to show your love so openly that it becomes an obvious vulnerability.”